I've decided to try offering free shipping on this one, building that cost into the price. So it costs more now, but with no scary unknowns for the cost of shipping. Maybe that gets someone buying instead of just looking... This was a steal! Still is! Buy now before I lose even more faith in ebay and pull everything... Act FAST!!! Oh, and unless you're ebay just ignore the next bit in italics - that's the squiggly letters for a few people recently in my messages. Join me down yonder for more on the guitar.

A while back a buyer lodged a complaint about me with ebay because his guitar hadn't yet arrived. OK. Thing is, this buyer ordered the guitar as he was preparing to move, from Branson MO to somewhere in Oklahoma. OK, I guess. Not OK? The fact that this buyer had himself arranged for the forwarding!!! Maybe he forgot? Or more likely the USPS tracking let us all down, because it only showed the attempted delivery in Branson, with nothing further, for days, until I investigated further, something I should NOT have ever had to do!

This complaint resulted in ebay withholding a small but crucial sum of money from me at the worst possible time, just as several autopays for bills were set to happen. I tried the normal ways to rectify this situation - interacting with their customer service apparatus with no satisfaction at all, AND most importantly I contacted the buyer to reassure him that the guitar was on its way, no matter what the tracking said, and hey, could you have ebay free up my money? He did try, or said he did. He also had one arm, but that's neither here nor there... I don't doubt that he tried! By then I'd spoken with my local post office lady, who'd looked at her post office lady computer and seen that the guitar had been forwarded and was set to be delivered shortly.

Why ebay didn't have access to that information is anyone's guess, but that and incompetent customer service agents all resulted in my being late on lots of bills and not having any spending money for almost a full week!!! I went through jars of change, couch cushions, everything! I was panicking all throughout this time, with multiple calls to ebay demanding that they look at the situation and do the right thing. They were unable or unwilling to do so, probably due to the tracking info not being up to date. I was extremely angry and ended up shouting profanities at more than  one ebay agent. Not fun, but it felt good at the time.

This was dire! My whole ebay business endeavor here, which had just had a $5000 first month, was nearly a goner! It's a miracle that I was able to quickly sell enough stuff at big losses to stay afloat, but somehow I did. Just an awful thing to go through, but who do you blame? The buyer was just going by the tracking, as was ebay. I guess it's on USPS.

But here's the part where ebay's on the hook. I called their customer service people, as mentioned before, in a panic, at least 3-4 times over the course of that weekend, hoping to explain the situation and get my money restored so I could pay all the bills. Not one of them was able to do the minimum effort necessary to see that yes, this buyer now knows where his guitar is and the complaint is no longer valid.

All it would have taken was reading the messaging between the buyer and I, and not one of the agents did that. A few put me on hold and said they were doing that, but they came back obviously not having read it fully and with the same answer: no, you can't have your money. In fact it took me lodging a complaint against the buyer to finally free up my cash, a process that took far FAR too long, but I was done with the customer service apparatus, and I will not willingly call them again, ever.

So it's up to ebay to start noticing all these listings and come to me with a solution. They'll need to fix my credit completely, likely by just paying it all off, because I was days late on several things, and one was super late, another few days, with calls every few hours until I finally paid them at midnight after having sold something else quickly at a big loss, something I'm still doing to a lesser extent due to this debacle.

If I need to bring lawyers into this, so be it. This will be fixed! Until the situation is rectified I will include all this text here in italics in every listing. Your move ebay...

So yeah, I listed this guitar a few months ago, maybe less, but I had it all wrong. I had it listed as a Monoprice Indio, when in reality it's a Donner. That really doesn't make much difference, as both are in the upper echelon of Chinese guitar purveyors. I had one Indio tele that I liked so much I refinished and modded it extensively. It's now among my all time favorite guitars. I'm pretty sure this Donner tele is a very very similar guitar. With a good setup and some fresh strings these Chinese cheapos, even the lesser brands, can be amazing for the price, and the better brands like Donner and Indio are super consistent and reliably good for me and for others I know that use them every day. They're certainly as good as (or better than) Fender's own Squire brand, made overseas as well, and in my experience with poorer quality control. I've only ever owned two Squires and both were bad, one so bad I couldn't believe it got shipped (no output from pickups at all!). I think I got that great Indio right after that and haven't considered a Squire anything since.

Bottom line? This can be a great guitar for any level of player. If I was still gigging I'd be using the modded and refinished orange Indio, and this is essentially that, just without all the mods. You'll have to do that yourself! Locking tuners are like 25-30 bucks, and there's no real need to do anything else - these really do sound and play like telecasters. This is a solid value, even a great value, like all those cheap yet somehow still delicious foods. I'm selling it even cheaper than I normally would because I'm still in need of fast cash, so take advantage of that and of me and buy! Help out a one time working musician trying to work my way back to playing shape! It's not going as quickly as hoped...

Thanks, and please, buy. Politeness! Where do you get that these days? Feel free to use it! Thanks again!